Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawai'i - Hardcover

David E. Stannard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670033995 ISBN 13: 9780670033997

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2005

Synopsis

Traces the racially charged rape, kidnapping, and murder trials that kindled social and political transformations in 1930s Hawaii, recounting how the wife of a naval officer in Honolulu accused six islanders of gang rape and how her mother, infuriated by the case's subsequent hung jury, arranged the murder of one of the suspects. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

David E. Stannard received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is a professor of American studies at the University of HawaiÂ’i. A Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and American Council of Learned Societies fellow and a widely recognized authority on HawaiÂ’ian history and culture, he has written five previous books, including American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Hawai`i of 1931, for most Americans, was a balmy haven of green mountains and white sand beaches, the floral "Paradise of the Pacific" to which movie stars and millionaires traveled for romance and recreation. Less famously, it was a forcibly annexed U.S. territory, controlled by the military and a white supremacist oligarchy. The overwhelming majority of residents were native Hawaiians and Asians who toiled on plantations for near-slave wages or filled Honolulu's crowded and restless urban slums.

It was against this background that Thalia Massie, the wan, aristocratic wife of a naval officer stationed at Pearl Harbor, accused five nonwhite young men of gang rape. The ensuing trial brought out the best and the worst in Hawai`i's citizenry, but the case against the suspects was weak and the trial ended in a hung jury. Outraged, Thalia's husband and socialite mother arranged the kidnapping and murder of one of the suspects, Joseph Kahahawai. The national press described it as a justifiable lynching and an "honor killing," while the American public rose up almost as one-to support the killers. In the spectacularly publicized trial that followed, the country's greatest criminal lawyer, Clarence Darrow-for his largest fee ever-sailed to the islands to defend the lynchers, a sad epitaph to a noble career.

The Massie trial was Darrow's last case. Its daily progress commanded the front pages of the nation's press, and it remains today one of America's most sensational courtroom dramas. But David Stannard's masterly account reaches beyond the headlines. With access to scores of personal letters, medical records, trial documents, and hundreds of unpublished interviews, Stannard reveals the surprising private lives and disquieting motivations of all the main players. Re-creating the dramatic courtroom clashes and their political aftermath, he shows how, even in the face of a powerful cabal of corrupt military leaders and corporate magnates, a small group of courageous people-attorneys, jurors, a judge, a single newspaper editor, and the falsely accused rapists themselves-refused to be cowed.

Their moral courage in the face of injustice united the disparate elements of the islands' Hawaiian and Asian communities and laid the foundation for what may be the most stunning political turnaround in American history: the overthrow of the longstanding white oligarchy. Riveting, richly detailed, and written with authority and grace, Honor Killing is both a gripping true crime story and a pathbreaking work of social history.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0670033995
• ISBN 13: 9780670033997
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480